The Ricochet Podcast - College Rules

Episode Date: March 15, 2019

This week, we start the show with a deep dive on…Beto O’Rourke (hey, know thine enemy, folks). Then Las Vegas Review-Journal White House Correspondent Debra Saunders joins to discuss the Emergency Powers veto — what happened, what will happen, and why some Republican senators voted against it. Then Tim Carney stops by to discuss his new book Alienated America: Why Some Places Thrive While Others... Source

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Whether it's communications or security, Innovate has you covered. Visit Innovate today. Innovate, the IT solutions people. I would rather be governed by the first 2,000 people in the Boston telephone directory than by the 2,000 people on the faculty of Harvard University. As government expands, liberty contracts. It's funny, sometimes American journalists talk about how bad a country is because people are lining up for food.

That's a good thing. First of all, I think he missed his time. Please clap. It's the Ricochet Podcast with Peter Robinson and Rob Long. I'm James Lalix. Today we talk to Deborah Saunders, who is the White House correspondent, and she's there at the White House, and Tim Carney about his new book. Let's have ourselves a podcast. It's the Ricochet Podcast, number 439.

I'm James Lilex here with Rob Long and Peter Robinson, and both of them, I believe, if I can speak for them, have Beto fever, or is it Beto fever? You guys, you're the ones afflicted. Tell me. It's Beto. Beto. It's Beto. No.

He's trying to make it. The whole point is to appeal to Hispanics and the E in Spanish is pronounced A, Beto. No? Yeah, but no, but I think they say Beto. Beto? For some reason in Texas. It's not like he's that concerned with being authentic, Peter. Don't worry about it. Well, he's decided to run for president after driving around the back roads and contemplating and having Annie Leibovitz take pictures of him, which I guess is prerequisite for all this.

He's wearing jeans and a work shirt on a Vanity Fair cover, which I think testifies to his authenticity. He's been Instagrammed standing on a bar talking to people,'re in the middle of World War II, i.e. the people who are working on the Green New Deal are like those who are storming the beaches at Normandy. No one ever takes a quote like that and goes to an actual Normandy beach storming veteran and ask if you believe that the people who right now are in D.C. working the phones to get tax credits for solar panels are the equivalent of those who've just seen their friend's head shot off and bobbing away in the surf. But that'll go well because that's one of the boxes you have to tick, the GND. So he's got the teeth, though. He has Kennedy teeth. So people are saying that this is the GOP's nightmare, that a Biden-Beto-Beto-Biden-Biden combo would connect to America in a way that Donald Trump simply can't. I am not sure that Biden will run. I'm not sure that Biden could beat Beto and claim the top of the ticket. So we've all been making fun of Beto. It's all been on Twitter. And of course, he is a ridiculous person in all kinds of ways.

He served in Congress very, very briefly. He was a conservative Democrat, fairly conservative Democrat. Now he's running as a liberal. He hasn't actually achieved much. He's married to a lady whose father is worth $20 billion. The money seems to be a very important part of the way he lives and his career. All that. Got it.

Beto O'Rourke is a very, very formidable candidate. Here's why. He's likable. That cannot be said of any other Democratic candidate except possibly Joe Biden. He fits the Democratic pattern of the Democratic Party wanting to fall in love with a candidate. Something fresh, something new. That is the pattern. In the Republican Party, it's who's next, who who's earned the nomination that's the general gop nomination

pattern the democratic party pattern is let's find someone with whom we can fall in love and then there is this final point which is important if he can carry texas he gets elected president and there's a chance he can carry texas uh so he we we ignore him or we only i mean we must mock him he's he that's required yeah but we if we do nothing but mock him that is at our peril this guy is a very formidable candidate i think they said the same about john edwards but he probably won't have the same problems. Rob, I didn't say the same about John Edwards. Look, he came very, very close in Texas. He won the Dallas suburbs. He won suburban women in Texas. That's pretty good. And he won the under, I can't remember what the age breakdown was, but it wasn't just he won 18-year-olds. It was up to something like the age of 40 or so he carried he carried everybody under 40 he's also he's also poking

at something that the democrats really need something by the way that joe biden could would would be actually a formal candidate too i actually i kind of believe that joe biden if he wanted to and had the strength and the health he could be the next president. But this guy, all of the conservative votes or all of the conservative leaning or pro-market leanings that he has right now, even his ties to billionaires, which I think Republicans point to as a sign of hypocrisy, he's not as far left, or at least not as openly far left as all of the other people running. He's running to the right of them. That is a very, very smart – look, I'll just be super blunt. It is a very smart thing for a white male Democrat to run as a moderate.

That is a very smart thing. That is how you win the general. That may give him trouble in the primaries. It certainly will give him trouble in the the primaries it certainly will give him trouble in the primaries but he is a pretty good campaigner he might be able to sort of you know hopscotch his way through a bunch of tough states and uh let the let the communists and the socialists fight it out over who's you know who's going to build more transgender bathrooms um and he can kind of move to the move move the party where it needs to be

which is a little bit closer to the center not even that much closer to the center but it's a little bit closer to the center so yeah i mean look he's yeah you're right he's absurd and we roll our eyes but everybody we roll our eyes about at some point you know people roll their eyes when donald trump came down that escalator correct a lot lots can happen and the other thing he is no dummy he is who was it where was I reading this the other day? Somebody made the good point. It's actually it's a frankly, it's a kind of pedestrian point because it gets made over and over again. But I was reminded of it. face-off after the nominee the candidate who is more entertaining tends to win that points to something pretty that was me i think i said that oh that was you it was you and it was just two nights ago when i was so anodyne just like yeah that was you it was you so beto o'rourke is a show he is entertaining if we know anything about his campaign against Ted Cruz, we know that it was entertaining.

Audiences loved him. He would skateboard onto the stage. Second point. I mean, I keep saying second point. I've got two or three second points about Beto O'Rourke, which is why he's formidable. He's also sunny. He's optimistic. My sort of my first thought, you know, the cover picture in Vanity Fair where he has his he's wearing jeans, he's got his hands in his back pocket, and that was Annie Leibovitz intentionally paralleling a very famous painting of Ronald Reagan.

She's comparing Beto O'Rourke to Reagan. And of course, my first thought was ridiculous. My second thought, well, you know, of course, on policy terms, ridiculous. Of course, Ronald Reagan was a very substantial figure by the time he'd run for president, two-term governor of California. But when it comes to temperament, outlook, Beto O'Rourke is sunny. If immigration says about us, that all the world wants to come here. So he takes these he takes problems. And by contrast with, of course, Donald Trump, but also Bernie Sanders and Kamala Harris. There's anger, there's darkness, and a lot comes back to O'Rourke. And you know what? The country's good. We're having fun. We're going to work this out. He's very upbeat. Who would you rather who would you rather? Who's a more appealing politician, the guy f reagan or the guy faking lenin right and it is he's faking reagan so um yeah

i think that he's a real candidate well to rob's point about entertainment i mean bill clinton probably won the election when he put on shades and played sax on our cineo show right because we this was here was a cool guy, and when Beto shows up on Kimmel or one of the rest of them and gets out his guitar and starts playing, there will be swooning. Because you're right. I mean, the people who are angry,

the people who are angry, and justifiably so in many cases, are going to vote for the guy who is the fist, who wants to punch the other side, who wants to fight hard, who wants to kill and destroy and murderize the other side in order to make a better country. But the people who aren't burning with that kind of anger are going to vote for somebody, you're right, who's sunny, but also as with Obama, somebody who makes them, who makes you feel good about yourself. You're the kind of person who votes for this person. And the self-regard involved in that is very powerful. So yeah, I mean, I almost, I hope that it's him or Biden, as opposed to the other people who themselves are

pure, undistilled socialism and would be an absolute nightmare for the country. Now, whether or not he's a stalking horse for that and just gets into office and decides to blithely wave through all of these ridiculous ideas, we don't know, but it is an interesting candidacy and it seems to be based on nothing more than a smile and a wave. We'll see. Yeah. The smile and the way he is, he is Donald Trump's worst nightmare because Donald Trump's best argument, we'll see how the campaign develops. But right now you'd have to say his best argument is look like me or not. And I know a lot of you don't i'm all that stands between you and them and if them is kamala harris or bernie sanders or elizabeth warren he wins he wins but if them is beta o'rourke people are saying wait a minute i don't need protection against beta o'rourke he seems

like a perfectly nice guy exactly exactly that's very bad for Trump. What's amazing is he needs a scary, scary opponent. Or he needs an unscary. Yeah, he needs. I mean, what's amazing to me is just how how how how much complicated math this seems to be for the Democratic Party. Despite incredibly long list of historical precedents, they seem to stumble and farce gump their way into what is a winnable Democrat candidate, a moderate southerner. And a white male especially can help peel off a lot of white working class men who voted for Trump. Not all of them, but some of them yeah no well some of them yeah but i i don't think there's the white working class guy is going to look at beto as one of them i think they're going to see a college boy who dilettantes his way from

this to that and skateboards when he should be actually working with his hands or fixing the car his success in texas his success in texas suggests the opposite it's all yeah i think the success in texas may be ascribed to suburbs and uh and and women who found him to be a compelling character or likable or just cute somebody you just want to take home i mean i don't know but when you say that it's great that he's moving to the right of the rest of them. That's true. It does also put the lie to the fact that if things are so dire as they keep telling us that we need this undiluted, you know, democratic socialism that they're giving us, then the fact that they can actually switch and say, actually, this moderate guy is the one we want, indicates that things might not be so dire or need the solutions that they are recommending. But that's a good point because I think that the emergency candidate and the emergency politics is sort of – I think is slowly exhausting itself.

I mean it's definitely exhausting on the right. Remember the right. People voted for Donald Trump because of the absurd idea that it's the Flight 93 election, that we are on the precipice. So there was this emergency. It had to be Donald Trump. And I think the left is trying to do the same thing, which is this emergency to anybody but Trump. But I suspect the American people, especially when you look at what they did in the midterms, aren't convinced by that. They are not 100 percent behind the idea that there's this giant chaotic calamity that we have to avoid as a nation, if they're on the left or the right.

So a sitting candidate may actually get some traction. I mean, I know, Rob, you regard these people with a gimlet eye and that there may actually be people on the left in a party who are not absolute dogmatic, doctrinaire people who've looked at polls and realized that climate change is really way down there in the list of things that people are worried about. And that if you run really hard on this with the promise to spend everything and remake everything, that unless you're the sort of person who really spent all of Friday watching the children's march out from schools across the nation to gladden your heart about the hope. I mean unless you're people who are constantly obsessing over these things, it's not in the top five. It barely makes the top ten.

And so if they run hard on that, that doesn't crew well. No, you're right. But it's like everybody has got to do a little bit of a certain kind of sandwich eating when they run in the primary of their party, both left and right. I mean the benefit for a candidate in the Democratic Party moving slightly to the right or even to the right, even sharply to the right is that's still pretty left because there's nothing – you can't be actually more left than the Democratic Party's – at least their frontrun currently bernie sanders without actually being a communist without actually believing that we need to dismantle

the constitution right he's about as far left as you can go so it's not a bad position just being pure politics for a bright attractive energetic um persuasive uh magnetic male politician to be moving to the center um you know he'll have to like he'll have to say a lot of stuff that he may even believe but he'll have to say it to win the win the uh primary well he gets the general he'll he'll have later predicate to be to run as like hey listen aren't you aren't you tired of all this yelling man like why are we fighting each other dude like bro we're we we agree with so there's so much we agree on it doesn't have to be this way it doesn't have to be this constant uh the president tweeting and saying things at three in the morning and if you're the whole you know

72 000 votes across three states that was a pretty narrow victory uh a victory in those states that have gotten weaker and weaker and weaker over time so there are a whole lot of people who would say okay you're not you promise you're not going to be insane. OK, you got my vote. Now, you and I both know the minute he gets in, it's probably going to be hot and cold running socialism. But right.

I'm just speaking pure to politics. You're absolutely right in the extent that I said. Laptop. Check. Spanner. Check. Screwdriver. Check.

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At Innovate, we are the IT solutions people for businesses across Ireland. From network security to cloud productivity, we handle it all. Installing, managing, supporting and reporting on your entire IT and telecoms environment so you can focus on what really matters. Growing your business. Whether it's communications or security, Innovate has you covered. Visit Innovate today. Innovate. The IT solutions people. Laptop. Check. Spanner. Check. Screwdriver. Check.

A career built around me, check. Bring your best self to work every day with exciting heavy vehicle mechanic apprenticeship opportunities with BusAaron and Dublin Bus. We are leading the way in sustainable public transport, moving from fossil fuel to zero emissions. Join our team and help keep Ireland on the road to greener journeys. Enjoy a career that's built around you. To apply, visit careers.busseran.ie today. There's before a lot of people who don't follow politics as obsessively as we might, who don't spend all day on Twitter scrolling and feeding and looking at the arguments.

To them, politics is the house next door. And right now, the house next door is a party house. It's really loud and there are cops coming at all hours of the night. And there's always calamity over there. And there's a fridge on the lawn and there's fireworks and they're tired of it. And they may like the way things are going, but they would like things to be in the neighborhood to be a little bit calmer. And so the first guy who seemed to come along, gives you the idea that the neighborhood's going to quiet down the return to normalcy, if you wish. You can't underestimate the appeal to that. And everyone who's a partisan of Trump and loves what he's doing and loves what he says and the rest of it doesn't realize that not everybody is like that.

A lot of people just sort of want things to be normal and boring. And what's exciting about the Trump presidency to many people is that it accomplishes things. To them, they see that things are getting done. And so it's good. It's not only dramatically exciting. It's actually factually excitinges things to them. They see that things are getting done. And so it's good. It's not only dramatically exciting. It's actually factually exciting because things are happening. But that's not everybody. And there's a lot of people you want to get on your side to say it's going to be calmer.

And Beto, Beto, Robert, Bobby, Francis looks like he would promise a calmer time. Now, if he's smart, he'll get out to the right of the greenies and say, we need to talk about a green new deal, but it's not going to happen without nuclear power, and then drag that over. And if they're smart, they'll take that as their foot in the door for allowing them to remake every single building in America. No, you're absolutely right. I mean the follow-on politics are terrible. I mean, what you just said, though, I think echoes some of my public remarks more recently, which is that this happened Wednesday night.

Some of my public remarks? I don't know. Peter, you got it. You sounded like Winston Church. Go ahead. I made public remarks to this effect. But I just got the cable ratings for some reason. I got them in my inbox. I don't know why. This morning, from Wednesday night, I guess, so Wednesday night. Sean Hannity, hugely popular, number one, gets about 3.3 million viewers of his show.

0.75% of one – 0.75 of 1% of the population of the country. Right. And so, um, nothing trivial, trivial, Rachel Maddow, the evil Rachel Maddow gets 3.2 million. She's really close to Sean Hannity. So just say that there are 7 million Americans who are, you know, you can pretty much say that it's the high watermark for both Fox news and for MSNBC. So, uh, there's 7 million Americans who are just eat, sleep and drink this for breakfast, lunch and dinner. And they and they have directly injected into their veins.

And they are mad about it. They're just furious. Right. These are mad people are angry. They think the country is going in the wrong direction. They think that Democrats are too liberal. They think the Republicans are racist. Whatever it is, they feel like on either side. The question is whether that 7 million people is statistically or meaningful in politics, and the answer is no. You need 65 million people in America to vote for you for president, and even then, you probably lose. So it's a hard thing. Well, you know, Rob, those people who are – those 7 million people who are involved, you know that sometimes they see what's going on. The whole bumper sticker thing, if you're not outraged, you're not paying attention. It's hard for them to sleep.

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Promo code Ricochet. And our thanks to BolanBranch for sponsoring this, the Ricochet podcast. And now we welcome to the podcast Deborah Saunders, White House correspondent for the Las Vegas Sun, and she is in the swamp. No, no, no. Las Vegas Review-Journal. Oh, I'm sorry. I'm reading what I was given here. That's the producer's fault here. We will have to beat him with switches after this review journal. Let's take that from the top again. Three, two, one. And welcome to Deborah Saunders. She's the White House correspondent for the Las Vegas Review-Journal, and she is in D.C. itself, in the swamp with her hip waders on, we presume.

Hey, Deborah, Trump is set to scotch the resolution to block the border emergency. We have the Tillis to veto the resolution that came out of the Senate, but they're not going to be able to override it. And the question is, is Donald Trump going to just seek vengeance from those Republicans who decided to vote for the resolution because they were fearful of losing their power of the purse? And that's what we're all waiting to see. What's he going to be like? So he's doing this in the Oval Office. That means that it'll be, you know, the smallest room, the pool spray will be, pool reporters will be throwing out questions to him.

What is he going to say? Is he going to be quiet? Is he going to sort of act as, is he going to basically make it clear that he's going to go after Republicans who didn't agree with him? Let me just read a tweet that he sent out earlier today. I'd like to thank all of the great Republican senators who bravely voted for strong border security in the wall.

This will stop crime, human trafficking, and drugs entering our country. Watch when you get back to your state. They will love you more than ever before. So among the 12 Republican senators who voted against this was Susan Collins. She's running for re-election. I don't know that she really wants Donald Trump to stump for her in Maine. That's right. So could he possibly unleash the bikers, though? I mean, he's talked about the bikers. Hey, Deborah, it's Rob Long in New York. I got a question. I mean, on the moving timeline of this issue, hasn't the momentum or at least the leverage gone towards the president as the border situation sort of gets worse and worse?

Doesn't the – I mean the argument against the emergency declaration was that it seemed capricious and gratuitous and not necessary and not justified and kind of an overreach of presidential power. But as the weeks go by and the New York Times and other people start to notice that there is sort of a calamity on the border, doesn't he get a little stronger? I think he does get stronger. And that New York Times story where it talked about 75,000 unauthorized migrants crossing the border in one month, the border at the breaking point, it definitely helps him. And the other thing that helps him is basically he's not going to compromise. He's not going to back down. We know Tom Tillis, who's running for reelection, that Tom Tillis was someone who really, he

said he was not going to vote for, he was going to vote for the resolution against the president because he didn't like this usurpation of the power of the purse. And now he's on board. Ben Sasse, same thing. So basically, you have a president who has let people know that you just don't cross him. And the question is, once these other Republicans have crossed him, do they do they ever go back?

Hmm. And Peter here, Deb, it's also it's it's an interesting list. In other words – is getting, I think, getting stronger for Trump because the facts at the border are what they are, and it does look like what any ordinary person would think of as an emergency, at least plausibly, but also the legal case. I thought a big moment took place earlier this month, I guess it was 10 days or so ago, when Peter Wallison, former counsel to President Reagan, published a piece in the Wall Street Journal in which he pointed out that Congress gave presidents the right to enact national emergencies in 1976 and presidents of both parties have done so 57 times. Trump isn't engaging in some constitutional overreach. As far as I could tell, then that argument began sort of percolating through.

That's exactly the argument that Ben Sasse ended up making, right? Is the legal argument sort of went in his direction as well? I think you're right. And I think what happened is there was at first when he when he made this proposition, people were saying all the legal scholars say that you can't do this. And that's just gone away. And we've had a lot of a lot of people who say, wait, there are there are people who really care about the law who have voted on both sides of this issue. So let's consider this not clear cut. And of course, it'll end up before the Supreme Court. Right. And but among the list, I'm sorry to go back to the earlier point.

Susan Collins may not want him in Maine, but Roger Wicker is a senator from Mississippi, which is going to vote for Trump no matter what. Roger Wicker defied him. Mike Lee, Utah. Now, Donald Trump is not popular in Utah. And we already know that Mitt Romney, there's bad blood between Romney and Trump. But Mike Lee, the other senator from Utah, who is a very fine constitutional lawyer, voted no. This is tricky for Trump. Yes, I think it is. And again, I think the other problem is he's hinted that he's ready to seek vengeance against Republicans who crossed him. And once that happens, why go back to him, right? I mean, if you're going to be excommunicated for this, you might as well go all the way. And this could be really a breach in the way he's dealt with Republicans. He's kept them pretty much on line with him through his presidency, and this could – unless he can find a way to make things chummy again, this could be a problem for him in the future. again so just speaking politically for a minute um how who needs whom more because it seems to

me right now if the border situation continues if the dots you know are connected and move in this in the direction they're moving in that trump will end up looking prescient and like he was trying to be proactive to use the term uh and everyone else is foot dragging and waiting until the they got worse and worse and worse um on the other hand there there's a I wouldn't say 100 percent of the Democratic caucus in the Congress in the House, but I would say ninety nine point nine percent of the Democratic caucus in the House seems to be holding hearings investigating every other aspect of Trump's life. Those things will eventually, if anything, takes hold, will eventually become something that ends up in the Senate. He's going to need those Republicans desperately to fend off whatever onslaught comes from the Democrats in the House against him and his family and his administration and his taxes and every other piece of business he's ever done. So if you're Trump, if you're Romney, who do you where do you who's got the power right now? Well, I think Mitt Romney has decided that he has the power of being an anti

Trump. But but but but he can play the anti Trump in a way that let's face it, the other senators cannot. Correct. So look at that. Look atul rand paul is someone who frequently says he's not going to vote the way he wants trump wants him to and then he always comes home this time he didn't so i think that you're going to see and if these senators hear from their constituents that they're glad that they did this we know that susan collins will hear that right but if others hear it then i think you're going to see uh i think you're going to see some independence and some daylight between the president and Republicans in the Senate. And when it plays itself out, maybe it'll just be a consistent seesaw that there'll be some – some Republicans will come home to support him if he needs their help later. But it does seem to me like he this this thing is incredibly fluid.

And what he really needs is for most of those Republicans to come up with the language they need to come up with. Maybe they can borrow from Ben Sasse for why they've changed their minds or why they're going to change their minds. You know, I mean, the thing is that there are Republican senators who desperately tried to get Trump to come up with some deal to accommodate them to so that they could vote for the resolution, but they could understand for the national emergency. But with the understanding that they still held the power of the purse and he was absolutely inflexible about it. And I don't know. Tell me if I'm wrong. I don't normally think of Donald Trump as really thinking about the Constitution. So, Deb, here's here's one thing.

Here's one line he could take when he speaks. What is it? We are expecting him to talk in 10 minutes or 15 minutes. Here's one line he could take. I understand that there's a very important matter of principle here and that my 12 fellow Republicans in the Senate voted against this national emergency declaration as a matter of principle. They want to reclaim Congress's rightful power over the purse in the constitutional order. I am sympathetic to that.

I simply believe that this is the wrong moment in which to do so because we do have an emergency at the border and I am using National Emergency Powers Act of 1976 totally lawfully. But again, I respect my 12 colleagues in the Senate and we will come to that soon. Is that the line he's going to take? I just can't imagine that, Peter. Neither can I. I had this personal laughter as I... Yeah. This is just not the president we know. Looking for reliable IT solutions for your business?

At Innovate, we are the IT solutions people for businesses across Ireland. From network security to cloud productivity, we handle it all. Installing, managing, supporting, and reporting on your entire IT and telecoms environment so you can focus on what really matters. Growing your business. Whether it's communications or security, Innovate has you covered. Visit Innovate today. Innovate. The IT solutions people. Laptop. Check. Spanner. Check. Screwdriver. Check. A career built around me? Check. Bring your best self to work every day with exciting heavy vehicle mechanic apprenticeship opportunities with BusAaron and Dublin Bus.

We are leading the way in sustainable public transport, moving from fossil fuel to zero emissions. Join our team and help keep Ireland on the road to greener journeys. Enjoy a career that's built around you. To apply, visit careers.busseran.ie today. Looking for reliable IT solutions for your business? At Innovate, we are the IT solutions people for businesses across Ireland. From network security to cloud productivity,

we handle it all. Installing, managing, supporting and reporting on your entire IT and telecoms environment so you can focus on what really matters, growing your business. Whether it's communications or security, Innovate has you covered. Visit Innovate today. Innovate, the IT solutions people. That's not the Donald Trump we've seen.

And I have to say, it's worked for him up until now. He has let any Republican who crosses him know that they will feel wrath that they have never felt before and that they better go along with him or their constituents will basically chase them into the Netherlands, right, into the netherworld. And now – but this time he's got 12 of them against him. And he either has to find a way to sort of shake hands and we're all pals. I can't see him being a statesman like as you were, Peter, just now. Or he's going to really go after these guys. And that will only further isolate him over time because with somebody like that, you realize that if they're angry at you because you're against them 1 percent of the time, you might as well be against them sooner rather than later because it's going to happen. I will say one thing. If you look at this list of 12 senators who voted against him, not a single one of them, no one could argue that a single one of them owes Donald Trump his seat, not one. And Mitt Romney, to state the obvious point, Mitt Romney is so popular in Utah, he gets to be

senator from Utah for the rest of his life. He will long outlast Donald Trump. Trump, Trump, well, anyway. So one more question, Deb, before I relinquish you into the hands of James Lilacs. You're there day in and day out. At this stage, deep into the Trump presidency, we sort of think we understand Donald Trump. What is it? What do you see in the White House when you see that man in person that the rest of us are missing, what would surprise us, if anything, at this stage? Yeah. I'll tell you two things. So I've been in interviews with him, and he comes across as far more thoughtful when he's sitting down in the Oval Office taking questions, not in front of a pool spray with a bunch of cameras, but just in that setting.

He's not as belligerent as we can see him sometimes. And the other thing I have to say is we're not seeing nearly as much drama out of this White House right now because Reince Priebus and John Kelly are no longer the chief of staff. And it may be that we're catching the Trump White House hitting a groove right now. You mean Mick Mulvaney has things under better control than John Kelly did? I believe so. I think we will find that. Because, well, I mean, think about it. Think about all of the unforced errors that we were seeing before that we're not really

seeing now. And no one's holding Trump back from being Trump, right? Right. No one's saying he can't tweet. No one's saying he can't kick the 12 Republican senators if he wants to. Right. But you're just not having as many of those really embarrassing moments that we saw before. I mean you can think of the time when John Kelly came out for that press conference.

I mean there have just been other things that – you're not seeing the big leaks leaks and you're not seeing some of the unnecessary drama that you saw before. So I do think we may actually see Trump with with a team that he's wanted. OK, so there's if I may, may I act as your editor for a moment? There's a story I'd like to read in the next month or two. And that story would be John Kelly was tough. He knew how to run a military operation. But maybe in chief of staff of the White House, what you really need is a seasoned politician. And maybe Mick Mulvaney is actually going to that's the contrast, the general who was a good, tough guy and Mick Mulvaney,

who actually knows Washington, who's like who's who's more successful as chief of staff there's your story assignment Deb I thank you thank you assignment editor I appreciate that I think it is a good story hey uh one last one um this is Rob again about um the the current controversy with the Republicans and Trump um which one of those Republicans I mean right now they have strength in numbers, right? Right now they're holding fast. Which one of them is going to cave first? Cave on what?

Which one of them is going to rethink, is going to give the president what he wants, is going to announce that maybe upon reflection he does believe the president what he wants is going to announce that maybe upon reflection um he he does believe the president can declare some kind of uh you know slightly modified emergency on the border which which one of them is going to which one of the 12 is going to turn it into 11 i mean they can't override the veto so that's sort of they don't have – nobody has to change. So I don't know where that would happen, to tell you the truth. I'm not saying it won't, but – Right, so they're not going to – you don't believe – you believe those senators have already made the final calculation about the political up or political down of the president's emergency powers? It's possible they could decide to vote,

not vote the way they did before, just saying it's done anyway, we don't have the votes. But in terms of saying we were wrong, why would they do that? What would they possibly get out of it? Well, what do you think, I mean, obviously we could take Ben Sasse at his word. I mean, there's always that, right?

He could actually be telling us exactly the truth. But what do you think was part of the change we could take Ben Sasse at his word. I mean, there's always that, right? He could actually be telling us exactly the truth. But what do you think was part of the change at heart for Ben Sasse? I think that the fear of having all of that ire turned on you is just – it's a fear. I mean, if you put all that energy into getting into the Senate and the thought of being primaried or the thought of just being a target of Donald Trump, it's not fun. And of course, I and the state of Nevada, our former senator, Dean Heller, is somebody who had real experience in that and that before. And he had been against Trump on the health care plan. And then Trump, you know, Trump brought him into the fold. But I don't know. You know, obviously, that didn't quite work out for him. And the Trump base does not forgive independence. The Trump base is, you know, not maybe maybe in some different state.

Things are otherwise. But in Nevada, that base did not forgive Dean Heller for not being gung-ho Donald Trump. Well, those who are opposing the president may fear that if they fall in line, they'll be subject to a withering editorial from the Borg. But I'm just wondering how many people out there are thinking that they're standing on principle when principle seemed to evaporate in front of them before. Deborah, let me ask you one last question before we go, and it's sort of related in as much as it has to do with Washington and the president. You wrote a piece in the Las Vegas Review-Journal about the DNC's decision to kick Fox out of the debates.

Is this just more petty, political, partisan tit-for-tat, or are we seeing, again, sort of solidifying the media bubbles, the non-contiguous information streams? Is this going to get worse? And what does that mean for the national discourse? It's horrible for the national discourse. Look at what's going on. What they really want to say, there's one network that's conservative, right? Fox News.

And the Democrats just do everything they can to marginalize that network and make it seem as though it's not really a news organization. And that is just – I mean that's what they do. We know that the candidates will go on Fox, some of them. But this is all part of the way of trying to delegitimize anybody who's conservative. And then you'll hear them say, oh, it's wrong to say that the mainstream media are liberal. Well, you can't have them both. Deb, you're beautiful when you're angry.

Thanks for joining us today, Deborah Saunders. Head on back. Enjoy the press conference, and we'll talk to you later with DC, which the swamp should be at least two or three inches down by the next time we speak. It is beautiful weather here today. You should be here.

There's nothing like a spring. I remember it well. And after what we've had here for weather in Minnesota, thank you very much for making me feel awful about where I live. Cherry blossoms out? Not yet. Soon. They're peaking out. Deb, you are the best.

Thank you. Thank you, Peter. Bye- They're peaking out. Deb, you are the best. Thank you. Thank you, Peter. Bye-bye. Bye, Rob. It is beautiful when the cherry blossoms are out, isn't it, Peter? Remember those? There's nothing like it to walk down there by the Tidal Basin, and it's all pink, and the floral scent to the air, and the tourists, and it's just D.C. at its absolute best. There's nothing like standing there and feeling the whole political world is irrelevant. And you are in a very, I almost say a calm place, wouldn't you, Rob?

See, he's not even trying anymore. I want to tell you about calm. I was on mute. I can't believe it. OK, go ahead. He's so calm. He's so calm he can't take the mute button. OK, now that's OK.

She turned me into a mute. That's because Rob incidentally did not spoil the segue because Rob is calm now. And I don't know quite what to ascribe that to other than he's been using one of our sponsor's fine products, Calm. Stress. Stress. It's a worldwide epidemic. We're working longer hours. We're inundated with a constant news cycle.

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And our thanks to Calm for sponsoring this, the Ricochet podcast. And now we welcome to the podcast, Tim Carney, commentary editor at the Washington Examiner, visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where he works on economic competition, cronyism, and civil society. He's got a new book, Alienated America, Why Some Places Thrive While Others Collapse. Tim, you went all over the country to research this book. and I guess I could ask you, why do some places thrive while others collapse? Well, it's not a simple economic matter. It's not just about a factory shutting down or the number of college degrees in a place.

It's about institutions of civil society. It's about how many things are there, how many organizations like a church, a little league, a bowling league, a college, something like that, that brings people together, providing a safety net, a sense of common purpose, a meeting ground, the sort of connections that we all rely on. And if we have them, we take for granted. That is the core difference. This is why some middle-class places can do really well, and some places, even with decent wages, can do really poorly. And it's the main reason sort of the elites do pretty well in this country is when you have strong institutions like that, the outcomes are good.

Hey, Tim, it's Rob Long in New York. I read this weekend a piece in the New York Times about my hometown, Baltimore, Maryland, which has always had a complicated urban life. But it has, you know, a lot of things that people expect. It's got transportation. It's got, you know, some industry. It's got a population that's not too huge, shift towards thinking about root causes of crime and away from actual enforcement on the streets. And the result has been the highest murder rate in the world. Where does law and order fit in that? So one thing is, I mean, if I can talk about root causes for a

second, sort of social trust highly depends on institutions like this that bring us together. So one study of Catholic churches that shut down showed that if you take a Catholic church that shut down for some sort of random cause, not because the neighborhood was closing down, but Catholic schools specifically, actually. The Catholic schools shut down because, say, you know, a water main broke and they couldn't fix it. There was a study of those and found that after those schools shut down, there was a big uptick in sort of the petty little crimes that then lead the way to bigger crimes. So that's the first thing as far as a root cause is when there's more social trust, when people know their neighbors more, there is less crime.

Baltimore is extraordinary, and it helps show how it goes the other way. That sort of a collapse of the police force doing its basic work, falling from the collapse of social trust after the death of Freddie Gray, etc., that that also leads to a higher crime, which then in turn helps erode those key civil institutions and erode neighborliness and civil society altogether. Hey, Tim, Peter Robinson here. The book, again, is Alienated America, Why Some Places Thrive While Others Collapse. And I want all our listeners to understand this is not a work of sociology.

This is a work by a fine journalist who writes beautifully. Don't think from our discussion that this is all going to be abstract questions and boring sociology. It's beautiful portraiture of human beings in American towns and cities. Tim is a beautiful writer. Tim, here's my question. You talk about the fraying of the social fabric, the shrinking of institutions, churches, community institutions where people get to know each other. Related point, but different. And I want to know how they're related to each other. And that is the family breakdown. So I'm always struck that when Daniel and Patrick Moynihan issued his famous Moynihan report in 1965, what alarmed him about the – he talked about the crumbling of the urban black family. And what alarmed him was a 25 percent out-of-wedlock birth rate. Oh, my. And now among whites, the out-of of wedlock birth rate is over 30 percent. And among African-Americans, it's over 70 percent. So clearly one thing that's going down on here is

the breakup of ordinary of what we used to think. Let's call them traditional. Laptop. Check. Spanner. Check. Screwdriver. Check. A career built around me? Check. Bring your best self to work every day with exciting heavy vehicle mechanic apprenticeship opportunities with BusAaron and Dublin Bus. We are leading the way in sustainable public transport, moving from fossil fuel to zero emissions. Join our team and help keep Ireland on the road to greener journeys. Enjoy a career that's built around you. To apply, visit careers.busseran.ie today. Looking for reliable IT solutions for your business? At Innovate, we are the IT solutions people for businesses across Ireland. From network security to cloud productivity, we handle it all.

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To apply, visit careers.bususseran.ie today. Patterns of marriage and family. How is that related to your thesis? Well, this is central. Chapter five of Alienated America is titled I Don't, and it's about the collapse of family because it is both a cause of the collapse of community, but the most important point I want to drive home to, I'm a conservative, to my fellow conservatives, is that the collapse of family is also a result of the collapse of community, which is to say that you look at the places where marriage is strong, the people with college degrees, a mother with college degrees, there's only 10 percent of them have babies out of wedlock compared to a majority of those who never went to college.

So that's a major class difference. And that also has to do with sort of the geographic segregation that increasingly people with college degrees live in neighborhoods full of other people in college degrees, and they do more of the institution building. They're living like conservatives, even if these people are the ones who are electing Democrats to control Congress. So that's a big part of it, that it really does, as a wise woman once said, it takes a village to raise a child. We have six kids. We are very pro-family. We know that we rely on our neighbors. We rely on our parish. We rely on our children's schools to do all the hard work of whether it's a carpool, bringing the meals when the baby's born, or just helping to enforce our norms. The world we live in is a really tough one to raise kids in. So one example I give is cell phones, smartphones, social media. Our children, our oldest is 12.

They have none of this. One thing that makes that much easier is none of their friends do too. And the parents that are in close circles with us in our parish, in our boys' school and girls' school, they have the same rules. So we get all this backup for these important things that help us be sort of countercultural in one way. But on a day-to-day level, we have so much support from our community. Yeah, yeah. I have, oh, go ahead, Rob.

I know, Tim, so I'm in New York City, and in the church that I go to, we were sort of all, we're talking at one point, and someone said, you know, it's weird because y'all can talk to people at work and i'll say oh i have a church thing on sunday or church thing on saturday night or even on ash wednesday coming into the office with the ashes on your forehead having you know um and it's a big city and it's a lot of people doing it but the it's seen as eccentric among certain types of people seen as kind of a oh wow you you go to church we say and part of the point of your book has been that factory closings in these communities is less

indicative of its health than church attendance or church closings i guess yeah why why is that that seems to fly in the face of everything we know about sociology, which is the root causes are always economic. Yes. So the, the, I don't want to downplay economics here. When the factory closes, that often functions as the first domino that then results in the local diner closing. And then a few active families move out and the public school loses a lot of its virtue, and then the church closes. But those ones, when the institutions of civil society fall down, that is the thing that takes away people's access to the good life. That is the thing that takes away the support structure you need to raise a family, the sense of purpose, just the meeting

grounds. We're not supposed to be these isolated individuals. So the economics plays a central role, but it's not the key role. And I talk about church, and Alienated America has a shuttered church on the cover, because for the working class and the middle class in the United States, throughout our history, church has been the central, indispensable institution of civil society. The wealthy and the elites can have other institutions. Secularization for the upper class has been manageable. Secularization for the middle class, they don't have a country club, an alumni network, or even necessarily a strong little league to fall back on. And so secularization has been deadly. When we talk about deaths of despair,

out of wedlock, birth, high school dropouts, all these negative outcomes, I think I argue pretty convincingly throughout this book that it's the collapse mostly of church along with other institutions that lead to those bad outcomes. Tim, this is James Lilex here in Minnesota. We have a lot of church closings in the city of Minneapolis and outstate as well. There are varying reasons for it. Sometimes the population just ages, disappears, and goes away. And sometimes the church is expensive to maintain, so they have to consolidate. But a town loses a church, and that's often the last thing they've lost. The big business is gone. The drugstore is gone. And there's nothing really to hold the place together. Even the Dairy Queen is gone. And so you have kids, what little there are growing up in these places, the only connection they have, the only community they have is the

ersatz community of social media, which is global. So they're simultaneously isolated, but they're also connected to every place in the world. But it's an illusion and it doesn't give them the same sort of moral historical grounding that living in a place with institutions does. And I don't see how that gets better in the near term. Do you? Well, so again, I think a lot of people are seeing the damage of social media, particularly on kids. I mean, I see it in my own life. So much of my life is wasted and so much of my anger comes from Twitter. But then with kids, it's particularly harmful. And you look in, again, go to the kids, the schools where my children go, and there's pretty strict policies, not banning this, but that steer kids away from it. Go to Palo Alto, too, where the people who write all these programs, where their kids are, increasingly, they're steering the kids away from. Just that realization of the harm has created some small communities where healthier attitudes towards this are developing. And that's sort of the uplifting and the depressing fact of this book is that it's because your outcomes, your life, everything is ultimately so local, no matter how much we might all think we're totally connected to everybody else, that on the local level, there are going to be sort of health

places where there are healthier attitudes towards it. But in general, I do agree with that pessimism that we think we're connected. Alienation is not just not being connected to other people. Well, it's not making us think that we're well connected when we're not. Tim, Peter here. Vladimir Lenin's question. What is to be done? So the first thing, like as with the Ten Commandments, a lot of them are thou shalt nots. So that's what I've got going on here. The federal government should stop chasing the church out of the public square. That's step number one. You saw it in the Obama administration. You see it in so many state governments, too. You can't run an adoption agency. You can't run a hospital if you're not performing abortions. All of these things have to stop, because if you care about the working class and the poor, you have to care about civil society. And in America, that means you spending programs for the poor and the needy, but it does crowd out these institutions, and that's harmful. And so what's going to be done is going to be, you know, hopefully everybody who picks up my book then is inspired to go out and say, you know what, there's some work that needs

to be done to make my own parish be more of a real institution of civil society. Or you know what? If I just started a weekly potluck in my neighborhood, then more people would think, hey, this is a good place to raise kids. And guess what? More people will have kids. The little platoons are going to be the answer. So we have to stop choking them off. And then on the individual and local level, we have to provide them with the juice the manpower the energy they need to do what they can beautiful thank you thank you james the new book alienated america why some places thrive while others collapse and if you'd like to be invited to tim carney's potluck uh follow him on twitter at tp carney and we'll bring the meat. Thanks, Tim.

Thank you. And by the way – What a way to get the meat, James. That's a very, very – that's very bold. Yeah, we'll bring the Twinkies. We'll bring something cheap. There's literally no way we could get enough meat to have that kind of a potluck barbecue or whatever. I'm telling you, at a moment's notice, I'll get you between 8 and 11 pounds of the best meat you'll ever have because of ButcherBox. ButcherBox, the incredible quality of ButcherBox.

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$20 off your first box and two pounds of free ground beef in every box for the life of your subscription. That's incredible. Go to butcherbox.com slash ricochet or enter the promo code ricochet when you get there. That's butcherbox.com slash ricochet. And our thanks to ButcherBox for sponsoring this, the Ricochet Podcast. Well, we have one more topic to get to, and we're going to leave you on tenterhooks as to what it might be. But first, as you know, Rob has spent 439 podcasts honing his member pitch. It's all terrible.

Here is iteration 439. I will give you this iteration. I spoke recently on Tuesday night at the Liberty Forum, Silicon Valley, surrounded by lots of fun people, very smart, great, great evening, lots of conversation. And afterwards, met up with a bunch of Ricochet members and had a great time. And I only wish I could stay longer. That's the kind of thing that Ricochet fosters, which is is community which is the exactly kind of thing that tim was talking about um in real life and also on uh you know on the web but we also do this these series of podcasts and we have big plans for the future and i know that people listen to these and there are people who are listening to them and are saying well i'm not ever gonna do i

don't ever want to join. I don't know what to tell you except that we really do need you, and I understand that you don't want to, and I don't know how else to twist your arm. But there are a bunch of people listening to this, and I know there are. Enough people are listening to this right now who could put Ricochet on a very sound financial footing for the future, who have decided, yes, they kind of, yeah, I'm going to join. I'm going to join. I just keep putting it off. Well, don't put it off. If everyone right now who was thinking about doing it and was going to do it just kept putting it off, did it this weekend right now, a Monday morning for Ricochet would be

a very, very different day. And so all I can do is say, if you're enjoying this podcast you've listened all this way through this podcast uh join please hey rob peter here listen i have an idea who else would it be exactly what i was gonna say well it is peter uh i have an idea we all know people i mean we actually know specific human beings who listen to the podcast but haven't joined. And I think we should start calling them out. And I'll go first. Tommaso, Tommaso, I know that you're listening to this because you tell me you listen on your commute every day. And then by the time you get to the office, the podcast is over and you forget it, pull over right now. Tommaso, pull over and join. Okay, that's one. We'll see. Well, this is a fantastic new strategy. Shaming people. I think so.

We keep saying every person counts. Let's shame the one by one. A whole Old Testament shame. Yes. Why don't we bind them by the wrists, put them in the back of a truck and take them to the public square so that people can throw rotten produce at them. That's a shame. Yes. Why don't we bind them by the wrists, put them in the back of a truck, and take them to the public square so that people can throw rotten produce at them? That's Q2.

Okay. All right. Well, there's a grand idea. Thank you, Rob. I've got to ask you. The Liberty Forum was great. I enjoyed when I went there. Did you offer to put chairs away at the end of it?

Because I found myself putting chairs away. Oh, that was nice of you. No, but I was reminded by many members that you had already been there and when i said i was very blunt i said well who was better and they kind of looked at their shoes and said well you're both very different i mean james um has a more um polished entertaining yeah it was it was clear that the that that they just didn't want to say congratulations to you james you're very kind well when it comes to our little end of the podcast news bit here we can do the ridiculous or we can do the tragic and i'm sort of inclined

right now since the ridiculous has played itself out a bit to actually spend some time on the tragic and that would be the events in new zealand because there's something there's something horrible here aside from the horrible horrible awful horribleness of the event itself there's an ad there's an extra element here and it goes to what we were saying before about community and the internet this guy thinks of himself uh there's a joker basically kind of a chaos agent and his manifesto which people have been pouring through all day is a litany of memes and and shout outs and references to sub-internet culture alt-right culture the incel culture the people just you know basically lonely atomized friendless men, divorced from family,

cut off from everything, never contact with women, and they are auto-radicalizing like ISIS people on the internet. And in the video, which I haven't watched and won't watch, he shouts out, subscribe to PewDiePie, which nobody around here in the newsroom where I'm broadcasting now, I guarantee he knows what he's talking about. But Peter's sons do. Peter, if you ask your son what a lot of these references are, they're going to know them because the stuff from the absolute sewer of 8chan and 4chan to a lesser extent works its way up into meme culture.

So this guy is speaking a language to a particular generation and a particular segment of that that makes this unique. And it's only going to get worse because what this guy did was to seed all of these social media and internet platforms with his manifesto and his work to guarantee. And he put so many hooks into it that no matter what somebody is looking for, they'll find it. Radicalized by Candace Owens? Please. Learned about ethnic cleansing from a video game? Please. It is terrifying to me, but this is the most pathologically insane version of these guys, and there are a lot of them out there. 99% of them will never do

anything. They're just neckbirds. Beards will live at home and eat Domino pizza, but they're cheering them on, And it's ridiculous. I mean, we can. Well, are they cheering him on? Do we know that? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.

Just go to the comment sections. And that's where they do their little work. Now, when the Southern Poverty Law Center, you know, which, you know, has to be serious because they're not just about poverty, but about Southern poverty. When they start saying there's this surge in alt-right hate and the rest of it, they can't point to any specific groups. There's no ISIS. But these guys, in a sense, these guys aren't isis they don't have a caliphate they don't have leaders the sense but they're this is what exactly am i trying to say this is two

two things that are wrong with this one it's a it's an element that we don't pay enough attention to and we we react to oh you, the alt-right, et cetera. There's nobody there. They're few in number. They're irrelevant. They're not. There are a lot of them. And two, the other part about this, the way the national conversation is taking place is that this has the effect of delegitimizing legitimate conversation about immigration, about any number of things because the way it works, the way we've been sort of told by the media looking at this

is that there's a direct line from this guy to Jordan Peterson to Ben Shapiro and the rest of it, that it's all a continuous line and that there's no break in there. So this is authority one, and we need to have our heads screwed up. We need to know the terms is what i'm saying we need to what this guy's talking about not not the whole ethnic bs the internet language that he's using is something everybody had damn well better become conversant in in order to have a conversation about what this stuff is anyway that's what i said that's what i said

somehow and uh apparently neither of you have any idea what I'm talking about. Well, I was just going to say, how much should we offer Peter Robinson to tell us who PewDiePie is? I'm totally baffled by all of this. I could have made a million dollars. Well, James, I don't think you're wrong, but I think – I mean that's the problem, right? That's ultimately what's – if you read The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad, which is really about driving a guy crazy so that he does something insane and preying on somebody who's lonely and broken. The logistics of it are the break. That's what keeps things from happening, keeps the bomb from going off properly, keeps the communication from being efficient. some people from falling into this kind of craziness, is their own sense of sanity and reality,

which apparently, not apparently, we know for a fact, is incredibly fragile in the human animal. He was able to construct an alternative reality very easily using the tools of the internet. They're quite persuasive. As a matter of fact, I mean, I'm the last guy to say that violent video games turn people into violent killers. But if you are so disposed to do so and you would like to train, there's absolutely no

better place to do than a hyper-realistic murder simulator. Right. You know? I mean, and the reality that they create is very convincing and it's not exactly unreal. I will only say this. This is not – I'm not proud of this. But when I saw – like a lot of people, I was – it popped up on my phone, an alert. And I looked at the alert, and then I didn't pay attention to it. I had stuff to do, and I really didn't focus on the story or get into the details of the story until this morning.

And then when I read their number was 47, I think I actually noticed in myself this kind of, Oh, sit up and take notes. 47 is a lot. Yes. But I did want to, I sort of wanted to interrogate my own sort of self to like find out,

well, what number, what number wouldn't be a lot? What number would you read and think, Oh, okay, I'll get to that later? And I'm certainly being more and more inured over time to double digits, and maybe next time it's triple digits. Yes. Exactly, because there's somebody else in this community who is going to decide to one-up him. I mean in the past, if you wanted to go crazy on your own, you would have to find secret messages.

You'd be a paranoid schizophrenic finding messages in magazines and billboards and the rest of it. Here we have an actual community that floods their world with information and amusement and entertainment and self-reinforcement. There's no morality to it there's there's nothing it is in the emptiness at the at the center of it is is is like a black hole all we can do from here is just sort of observe people on the event horizon before they it's anyway peter ask your kid who pewdiepie is is. PewDiePie, I will. Here's how this is going to work, and you will see this in the news. He's a very popular internet personality on YouTube, right? And when people would shout out, subscribe to PewDiePie as sort of a joke along the lines of Leroy Jenkins or, you know, Uganda Knuckles, do you know the way, brother?

It's a line to say, I am connected to the internet culture. What it means is that when they look at pewdiepie and they google him they'll find out that he had a video in which he made an anti-semitic reference or and then there's a nazi controversy about pewdiepie so again they will draw a connection between that and make it all seem of a part all seem this whole disconnected world is actually part of a very cohesive nazi alt-right strategy to, which that's not what it is. But PewDiePie and Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro and all the rest of them are moving closer and closer to being undesirables to be deplatformed at every possible opportunity. All right.

Well, that's incredibly depressing. It makes you want to watch television where people are doing amusing things. And then we find out that there are people who play those actors in real life are doing the same things that are even more worse. William Macy, somebody pointed out that William Macy getting involved in the scandal was the sort of thing that a William Macy character would do in Fargo or a movie. But the blurring of the lines between the two, et cetera. I understand that you guys in California are absolutely transfixed by this story because it's entertainment related. And the rest of the country is just sort of revolted by these people tell me what i'm missing here about this oh i don't think you're missing anything

it's it's uh well i happen to live in northern california where a number of the people one of the people involved former former now he has been dismissed with cause as tpg the texas pacific group one of the i think it's the biggest private hedge fund in the country, employed Bill McGlashan, whose name is now public. I knew him when I was in business school. It turns out that Rob knew him when Rob was at Yale. Yes. And so I have two observations here. We both knew the same person.

And he's right in the middle of it because he spent $50,000 to have somebody fix his son's test scores and was willing to spend – I don't know that he did it, but he's on tape. He was willing to spend a quarter of a million dollars to have his son recruited at USC as a football player, a kicker, and the son's high school over in Marin county does not even have a football program and so item one is my observations this is a zero-sum game only so many kids get into each college class and so and anybody understands that so anyone who is trying to cheat the system to get his or her own son or daughter into a certain class whether yale got mentioned stanford got mentioned usc got caught up into it is keeping some other kid out and i can't think of anything more infuriating than that. And then the second thing is the, what was it? The, I guess I read it in the wall street journal had the, the, uh, the prosecutors have released some of the transcripts from these wires that were people, including Bill McGlashan were taped and McGlashan

said, uh, it's amazing. It's funny. I'm not quoting it exactly, but it's funny the way the world works now, or it's amazing the way the world works. If you are willing to have your son – you put together a cockamamie athletic profile for your son when it can easily be seen that he comes from a high school that doesn't have a football program. What does that say about your assumptions that people check up on you? That people, I mean, it just, I live in this world, I suppose, and I know I'm not wealthy enough to participate in that world. I suppose, thank goodness, probably bad for the soul. But even I found this set of events just shocking that they would do it, of course.

But what were they thinking? For some reason to me, that's even the more shocking matter. What could they possibly have been thinking? Felicity Huffman and Bill McGlashan and all the others. What could they have been thinking is that they deserve this. Yeah, you're right. The irony is here – I mean I don't want to make a giant political argument about this, but there is some irony, especially with Bill McLaughlin and some of the Hollywood celebrities, is that they were ostentatiously left-wing, ostentatiously talking about changing the world. McGlashan has been talking about working with Bono and doing all sorts of things and access and open access, and they saw somehow no difference between their public statements and their piety and, in fact, their condemnation of people who disagree with them and their private

actions of cheating the system of knowingly cheating the system so to me the most staggering thing about all this is just how the cognitive dissonance it requires to be i mean i understand people keeping their nose down or their head down and not being public figures and cheating that's what cheaters do there's a it was a one of them one of the people who helped turn this um who helped reveal this investigation i read the walter journal today was a corrupt uh financier who was trying to just skate out of a another uh set of um of of punishments he was facing uh for um with a purely financial scan yeah for the pump and dump you know you talk down at stock you talk up a stock and you don't tell anybody you own it.

So him, I don't excuse him, but for him, I have no beef, right? The guy's a cheater. He cheats at his business and he cheats in his life. But for these other people, for the constant harangues from them about what is a good thing and what is a bad thing and who is good and who is bad. Ethical investing. And which ethical investing. Yeah, that's a full investing. Which presidential candidates are better and which are which are worse, while at the same time they are actively using their money to cheat, not using their money to gain an advantage,

a fair advantage even, but to cheat and to cheat some other kid because they it is zero sum. They're only there's X number of places. To me, that's sort of amazing. It's almost like if I had written it, people would have said, well, it's a little – Over the top. Don't you think? It's a little too much.

The second thing I would say – No, before you get to the second thing, it's their public protestations of piety that permit them to do this. They have said – they've sung the liturgy, and therefore they can do what they want in the back room. Yeah, that's right. It is right. That's their – they pay the tax. Now they get to do whatever they want. The second thing I would say is what I find fascinating, which a young entrepreneur, Austin Allred, mentioned.

He runs a company called The Lambda School, and I saw him tweet this very, very early on as the scandal broke. Other people have sort of taken over the point, but it's a very good point. At no point does anybody, anyone, worry that these kids couldn't do the work when they got into these schools? No one ever said, well, you know, the kids, his scores are really bad and he's really kind of lame. We have to cheat in order for him to even make a decent number on that on the SAT. But no one no one wondered what he was going to make with that kid would do OK at that school because they know that they're heart of hearts that you don't actually have to work hard at college the college is in fact very easy and once you get in you're in what's interesting is that while rob is talking about college behind him is the sound of somebody

who is operating a heavy piece of machinery making a very good living doing so and probably has no debt from his from his vocational school. Exactly right. And we're not telling anybody to do that because college is a sign – college is the minimal expectation now of somebody that you have to go to college. You have to get a degree, and that proves – it just proves that you're part of the proper class. You can be part of the governing, overclass, technocratic folk if you have a degree, and the higher, the better. What that degree actually means doesn't mean anything unless it's in stem then it means a lot because you have to actually produce and you have to know stuff but if you have a degree from the liberal arts and i was a liberal arts major i

know exactly of which i'm speaking it doesn't necessarily mean that you can think clearly it doesn't mean that you're properly educated it means you have maybe expertise in a certain kind of esoteric knowledge that may set you apart and is of limited utility in the real world. But unless you go to college, who's going to pay attention to you? Because you're not Bill Gates, right? Bill Gates is the one person I think who was allowed not to go to college and be successful. Everybody else is required to do so. Well, Bill Gates, to his credit, dropped out of Harvard. Right.

Just like Mark Zuckerberg. Just like the Theranos woman, right. Yeah, yeah. So there were at least two people who thought, well, this credential doesn't matter to me. But everyone else is cheating and trying desperately to get in there.

I mean, look, I think this is a big story. I think it's going to be bigger and bigger and bigger because it's going to – it reconfirms people's belief, rightly or wrongly, that there's something deeply unequal in society. And it's not that – it's not just that rich corporate barons get what they want. It's that rich liberal loudmouths get what they want too. The word that ties both of these together seems to be rich, doesn't it? Yeah. So here we have Rob Long, finally at long last, turning into the Bolshevik who wants to level everything, wants to use the power of the state

to take money from these people in order for more democratic and equitable society. I think it was AOC's economic advisor the other day who said that we have to take the wealth and power from those who hoard it in order to make for a more democratic society. And that's just really just jack dandy news to hear from somebody who is close to the levers of power to take the money from the people who hoard it. And by hoarding it, they mean you have in your wallet more than you may need that day for lunch. No, that's right. That's right. But that's true. But that's part of the issue, right?

That's why when things like this happen, it's so depressing because it actually is a legitimate arrow in the quiver of the socialists right well exactly right it was the new york times michelle goldberg i think the quote was in a stratified society people will do desperate things to seem successful well these people are at the top of the uppermost to be top stratum there um and they're still doing desperate things yeah right and anyway seeming successful nowadays consists of being a 2 million subscriber person on Instagram who's talking about Sephora cosmetics. I mean, the definitions have somewhat changed. Oh, well, I'm sure we'll be able to solve this next week

if we have a little bit more time because it'll be podcast number 440, right? We're reaching a milestone of 450. Last time, didn't we fly to Paris and have a party or something? I think for 500. Let's meet in Paris for 500. We won't get

to that number if the people who promised to join don't join. That's right. Round you up, put you in the pickup truck, parade you around the square. That's Peter's threat, and we're going to live up to it. You can also go to Bowling Branch, Butcher Block, Calm. Those are all dot comsling Branch, Butcher Block, Calm.

Those are all dot coms. The promo code is always Ricochet. You will find things to make your life tastier, calmer. Your sleep will be better. Your life will be better. So support them for supporting us, won't you? And, of course, why don't you go instantaneously to iTunes to leave us a review? First, of course, you should go to Ricochet and sign up,

but then go to iTunes and review us, and more people will find us, and then we'll be more popular. There'll be more people that we get to guilt every week into not subscribing. How about that? Peter's new name-em-em, shame-em policy. Name them. Name them. Exactly. Who will he come up next week with? Well, you'll have to tune in

and find out. It's been fun, everybody, and we'll see you all in the comments at Ricochet 3.0. Next week, boys. I remember the birdie pot sweet device when you put me on the Wolverine

up to when and there It was still September when your daddy was quite surprised It was still September When your daddy was quite surprised To find you with the working girls in the county jail I was smoking with the boys upstairs When I heard about the whole affair I said, oh no

William and Mary won't do that Well I did not think a girl could be so rude And I'm never going back to my old school. Ricochet. Join the conversation. Thank you. I can't stand her doing what she did before

living like a gypsy queen in a fairytale well I hear the whistle but I can't go on take her down to Mexico she said one of one of the horror won't do Take her down to Mexico. She said, Oh, no.

What a horror. Won't do. Well, I did not think the girl could be so rude. And I'm never going back to my school